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It boggles my mind that I can own a computer that is 10,000 times faster than the CDC 6600 that I once programmed. There are many reasons for this success, one being the free market of components.
So...Let's build a computer! |
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Case, Power Supply from PC Power & Cooling
Two 866 MHz Coppermine Pentium IIIs Intel OR840 dual-cpu motherboard Two 256MB RDRAMs with ECC Two IBM IDE Disk Drives (very quiet) ATI Radeon 8500 3D Graphics Turtle Beach "Santa Cruz" audio 18" Compac TFT8020 monitor Floppy and Zip Drives 3COM Network Card Microsoft Windows XP Pro |
| The finished product, my dual processor P-III system. NEC Superscript 1800 laser printer (left) was also a good bargin. |
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Building a PC was fun, but I won't do it again. My current machine is a 1.8 GHz dual-processor Pentium 4 system from Dell. The big win is the maintanence contract, and it is also amazingly quiet. I treated myself to a 23" LCD monitor from Viewsonic, since I do graphics and image processing research.
A Kinesis Maxim keyboard and a Microsoft optical track ball are defenses against repetative strain injury. |
| I like to replace my computer when I think I can get a 4x improvement in speed and storage. So in 2005, I built my second PC: |
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Lian-Li aluminum case
Two Opteron 252 CPUs Tyan K8WE motherboard 8 x 1GB DDR-400 dimms 2 Western Digital 250 Gb drives ATI X800 XL graphics Apple 23" LCD monitor Plextor 712 DVD drive PC Power & Cooling 510 XE supply Microsoft Windows XP x64 |
| I finished my third home-built PC in 2008. I was hoping to base it on the new AMD quad-core opterons ("barcelona"), but they kept delaying, so I chose the 45nm Xeons from Intel. The Dhrystone benchmarks on these last three machines is as followes: Dell Workstation: 8782 MIPS, Dual Opteron System: 25,683 MIPS, Dual Xeon System: 99,685 MIPS. The components (many from www.gamepc.com) are: |
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Coolmaster CMStacker case
Two Xeon 5472 CPUs (3.0 GHz, 1600 MHz FSB) Supermicro X7DWA-N motherboard 8 x 2GB 800 MHz FB-DIMMs 3 Seagate 750 Gb drives (for RAID-5) nVidia 8800 GT graphics Dell 27" LCD monitor LG GGW-H2OL Blu-Ray/DVD rewriter PC Power & Cooling 1 kilowatt supply Microsoft Windows XP x64 SP2 |
| I designed my fourth PC in 2013. It's based on the new Intel Sandybridge processor. It has a lot more memory, but I spent a lot less on memory, because prices of DRAM have dropped dramatically. Orignally (as seen in this photo) it used a Supermicro motherboard, but it malfunctioned and was replaced with an Asus board. The Intel liquid cooler is highly efficient and wonderfully quiet. The components are: |
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Thermaltake Level 10 case
One Xeon E5-2670 CPU (2.6 GHz) Intel BXRTS2011LC liquid cooler Asus P9X79 Pro motherboard 8 x 8GB Kingston 1333 MHz ECC Dram Intel SSD 520 (240 GB) Two Hitachi Ultrastar disk drives (2 TB each) Asus GTX 670 graphics board Dell 27" LCD monitor (from previous PC) Later, LG 34UM95-P, 3440x1440 flat monitor Liteon iHBS212 Blu-Ray/DVD rewriter Seasonic X760 power supply (760 watts) Microsoft Windows 7 x64 |
| I designed my fifth PC in 2016. It's based on the four-core Skylake Xeon processor. This is sooner than I wanted to make a new machine, but my liquid cooler was failing for the second time, and I've had enough with that. I will use air cooling from now on. I chose a German brand of CPU cooler by Be Quiet, and it is indeed very silent. I went with all solid-state drives, including a very fast M.2 drive for the system C: drive. The components are: |
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Be Quiet case
One Skylake Xeon E3-1275v5 CPU (3.6 GHz) Darkrock 3 CPU cooler by Be Quiet. Supermicro X11SAE-F-P motherboard 4 x 16GB Samsung ECC Unbuffered DDR4-2133 Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD Two Samsung PM863 SSDs (4 TB each) EVGA 1080 GX SC graphics card Benq 3840x2160 monitor (32") Blue Ray burner Dark Power Pro 11 power supply, (1000 W) Microsoft Windows 7 x64 |
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